Three Paid Search Lessons Learned from Topeka Tourism Board

This morning I read a blog post titled "How Topeka Capitalized On Google's April Fools' Joke". In my opinion the only company that capitalized on this was Google not Topeka Tourism Board. There were three big mistakes Topeka made in trying to cash in on the Google�s April fools prank.

Hopefully, they did not lose a lot of money on this campaign and generated some awareness of Topeka. At least they got free placement on my blog.

There are three lessons to be learned from their mistakes:

1. Determine the goals of your paid search - What is the purpose of your Paid Search Campaign? Make sure you are not attracting a lot of unqualified clicks. In this case the purpose of buying paid search was not clear. Just because a high volume on a keyword was happening does not mean all that traffic is qualified for your business.
2. Define KPIs before you start spending money - Figure out how you will measure success. In this case they did not have any way to measure success. They listed number of impressions and clicks. So they paid for clicks but don�t know how many of them generated into anything of value? To me it seemed like that the visitors were tricked into clicking something but had no intention of visiting Topeka site. In other words they got a lot of unqualified visitors. I bet you that the bounce rate is huge (see my next point).
3. Make sure your analytics setup is correct � �Google� Mike, an Implementation Analyst on my team verified that the Google Analytics on their site is broken. One of the most glaring issues he found was the home page fires 2 page views per page view (i.e. it fires twice) so the reported bounce rate is lower than the actual bounce rate, which means it is wrong. In this case they are not getting the correct stats. Wrong web analytics implementation leads to wrong data and that leads to wrong decisions.
   
   
   
   

Comments? Questions?

---

Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board

Bounce Rate: All That Bounces is Not Bad - Part II

Most likely, you have all heard that high bounce rates are bad. Some people even believe that bounce rate affects your sites search engine rankings. Meaning higher bounce rate is bad for your organic rankings. I am not sure if that actually is true or not but it does show you that most analysts consider high bounce rates as a negative indicator of a site�s health.

Are high bounce rates really bad? Generally they are but you have to consider the other factors and put everything in context before you can come to that conclusion. In my post �All that bounces is not Bad�, I showed you that there are cases when the bounces are not really bad.

One of the causes of high bounce rate is the entry via �destination page�. A destination page is a page that provides the information that the visitors are looking for.

Destination pages are going to have higher bounce rate and no matter how hard you try you might not be able to move the needle on those pages. For this reason, most of the news sites, content sites, product info, support site, portals etc, are going to have a higher bounce rate than the ecommerce or lead generation sites. Visitors come with a mission e.g. to read an article, news, get information etc. and once they read the article they go back to where they came from (think search, twitter, facebook etc.).

Let me show you an example of a page that has a very high bounce rate. The page in this example has a bounce rate of 72%, which means that the page just sucks. Do you agree??? Let�s put this page in context and then evaluate.

Firstly, the page in question provides very specific information and is refreshed every week, sort of like a weekly horoscope page. To understand the visitor behavior I created a segment of visits that entered this page and then bounced.

As shown above 26.65% visits are �New� which means that 73.35% of visits had come to the site in past. That�s a lot of returning visits. It tells me that a lot of visitors are already familiar with the site and are coming back with specific mission and then bouncing.

To further understand how loyal these returning visitors are, I created another segment by adding additional criteria to just focus on the returning visits.

Over 90% of the visitors that bounced have come 3 or more times to the site. About 67% of these returning visitors have come 9 or more times on this site. About 30% have visited more than 50 times since they were first cookied.

About 90% of the visitors visited the site within last 7 days. Not bad. Since this page does not change within 7 days, it appears they might have visited the other pages on the pages on the site. However I have not found a way to prove that in Google Analytics.

What is this data telling me? It is showing me that the visitors that are bouncing off of this page are actually pretty loyal and are coming back to the site quite often. So what if they bounced in their latest visit? Now the 70% bounce rate does not seem that bad. What do you think?

So what�s the lesson? Don�t just look at the bounce rate and panic. Look at the other data points and then put everything in context before you jump to any conclusions. Remember �All that bounces is not bad�.

Comments?

---

New Job: Analytics Associate at Huge (Brooklyn, NY)

Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?

Post your open jobs on Web Analytics Job Board
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

All That Bounces Is Not Bad

If you have any connection with web analytics then, I am sure, you have heard about the bounce rates (see Bounce Rate Demystified and Typical Bounce Rates). A lot of analysts and a few web analytics tools are obsessed with the bounce rates. High bounce rate is considered bad. If you are one of those who is obsessed with the bounce rate or think that all that bounces is bad then this blog post is for you.

I do believe that bounce rate is a great starting metrics when you are trying to optimize your site but be careful and make sure that you are measuring the true bounce rate. Below are the three factors that lead to the misreporting of the bounce rates

1. Links to external sites - Many sites have links to the external sites such as sponsors, micro sites etc. Considering those external links as exits will count visits as bounces even though the visitors are doing exactly what you want them to do (e.g. click on those links that you provided them). See below a screen shot from First Tech Credit Union, there are few external link s contributing to the bounces.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Online Ads � If you serve ads on your site you are providing links to external sites. Visitors who land on your site, see an ad that grabs their attention are going to click on it (isn�t that what you want so that you can command higher rates for the ads?). It is not really a bounce because visitors are taking the action that you want them to take. See the screenshot from Techcruch which is full of ads and I bet this page (and other article pages) has a very high bounce rate.

3. Destination Pages � Pages that provide the information that the visitors are looking for is what I call destination pages. Usually you will see the visitors arriving from bookmark or search to the internal pages on your site that provide the visitors with the information that the visitors are looking for. Since those pages serve the visitors� need you are likely to see high bounce rates on those pages. Those bounce are not bad. Some might argue that you should try to drive visitors into the other sections of the site but I can bet that in most of the cases you won�t see significant drop in bounce rate no matter how hard you try. Below is an example of a page on First Tech Credit Union that could have a very high bounce rate. I arrived at this page by searching for the �Phone number for First Tech in Redmond�. When I arrived on this page I got what I was looking for and I bounced.
   
   
   
   
   

Are you considering these factors when analyzing the bounce rates on your site? Questions? Comments?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Web Analytics Jobs
Web Analytics Implementation Engineer at Topspot Internet Marketing (Houston, Texas)

Find Web Analytics Jobs
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Things I have been working on

There has been a lag in my blog posting lately, and it�s gone on longer than I like. Lately, things have been hectic at work leaving very little time for blogging. Any time left has been consumed the following activities:

1. Working on my Site, AnilBatra.com
   
   
   
   1. Ask an expert � I started a section for you to ask questions on Web Analytics, Behavioral Targeting and Web Analytics tools, particularly Omniture, WebTrends and Google Analytics. The questions will be answered by one of the people who have volunteered, one of my team members at Ascentium or me personally. So if you have a question please go ahead and fill out the form and someone will get back to you within 48 hours. If you would like to be one of the experts please email me a brief description about your skills and experience.
   
   
   2. Twitter � Google Analytics URL Builder � Nothing fancy here but a tool that allows you to create short URLs that you can post in Twitter and track them in your Google Analytics. It allows you to create short URLs for both your internal links (links to you own site) and external links (links that reside outside your site).
   
   
   3. Calculators � I am working on some basic and advanced calculators related to Web Analytics and Online Marketing. So far I have added a CPM, CPC, and CPA calculator (will be adding few more optional fields to it). More calculators will be added to this one. If you have suggestions on what calculators I should add then please send them to me.
   
   


2. Industry Average Bounce Rates � I conducted a survey to understand what Bounce Rates to expect for various types of sites. I added a pdf that shows the results of this survey.
   


3. Google Analytics Session for Seattle Tech Startup Group - I, along with Loren Bast, conducted a Google Analytics training session for the Tech Startup community of Seattle. Download the Seattle Tech Startup Google Analytics Presentation.
   


4. Future of Web Analytics Panel at SDMA � I have been busy putting together a panel for the Seattle Direct Marketing Association to be held on March 11.
   


5. Preparing for Breakfast Event in San Francisco � Gary Angel, Akin Arikan and I will be speaking at a breakfast event in San Francisco on March 9th. You can find more information and registration on my site.


6. Neel � Neel is the name of my 5.5 month old son. He is growing and getting more and more active every day and needs more of my time.

I expect to resume my blog writing schedule very soon.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/

Sr/Lead Analytic Warehouse/Java Engineer at Saas Company In the SF Bay Area (Emeryville, CA)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

Search Pay Per Click Tip : A Simple Way to Increase Profit

Visitors go to search engines because they are looking for something. They enter their search query and want the search engine to provide relevant results.

Marketers buy Paid Search listings because they want to cash in on visitors searches by providing relevant product/services/offers etc. Remember, users are looking for results and not another set of search boxes or additional navigation to get to what they want. It is marketers� responsibility to make sure the offers shown on their landing pages are relevant to the search keyword that the user searched for. DON�T make the visitors search again. Provide the user with relevant results right away. Don�t make people click more buttons or links to find what they are looking for.

You are wasting your money if you are doing PPC without thinking about the experience visitors will get once they click on the ad and land on your site. Landing pages are very critical to the success of any kind of advertising, but are even more critical in search advertising. Visitors don�t have patience. They need answers and if you can�t provide them with one immediately, they will go to a site that does. Your competitors are providing answers just a few clicks away. Here is an example to prove my point:

I searched for �hotels in Vancouver bc� on Google,



I clicked through three results,

1. Orbitz - Which is the top listing on the left hand side


2. Hotels.com � which is the 2ndd listing on left hand side


3. Expedia� Which is on the 1st spot on the top

Which one do you think will be most successful in getting visitor to book a hotel? See the screen shots below and you will know.



Orbitz takes me to a generic hotel search page and wants me to search again. It has �Ski Sale� listed in in-house banners on two prominent places. Where is ANYTHING related to Vancouver BC??? The site wants me to search again and does not provide offers or banners that are speaking to me. This site is pushing what it wants to sell and not what I want to buy. I don�t like it. I click back.



Hotels.com takes me to a generic hotel search page, just like Orbitz did. It shows Bora Bora, New York but Vancouver is nowhere to be found. What, you want me to search again??? Sorry, but I don�t have time. Check your bounce rate, you will see me there.


Expedia shows me the Vancouver hotels right on the landing page, provides me ratings, rates etc. It makes it easy for me to book my hotel. Rather than making me search again, it is getting right to the business of selling.
Which one do you think will drive more conversions? Lesson: When it comes to buying paid search traffic, don�t make your potential customers search again or browse around your site to find what they need because they won�t. Give them a relevant landing page and get to the business of closing the deal.

One thing you might be worried about is how you will go about generating all of these relevant landing pages. There are several tools such as Optimost, Test&Target, Widemile etc. that will take care of this for you. Most of the time you might just setup a generic landing page template and fill-in the content on the fly based on the referring keyword (see Follow the Search blog post that I wrote). The increase in conversion will itself pay for the cost of setting up unique landing pages, so cost should not be an issue.

If you still can�t justify the cost of having a unique and relevant landing pages then keep in mind that if you bid without relevant landing pages, two things will happen; First, as we already discussed, your visitors will bounce off of your site and go elsewhere. Second, the ad network (Google AdWords, especially) will penalize your page by decreasing your quality score, thus making it increasingly expensive over time to buy clicks. Yes, Google does score your landing page and will increase your minimum keyword bid prices if it doesn�t think you are providing its users with what they are looking for. Long story short: make your landing pages relevant.
Having relevant landing page will result in increase in revenue, lower bid cost and increase in profit.

Questions? Comments?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/

Latest Position: Director, Analytics at Resource Interactive (Columbus, OH)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Site: AnilBatra.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anilbatra

Typical Bounce Rates: Survey Results

Bounce rate has become one of the most talked about web metrics, and a lot has been written about what this metrics means and how it should be interpreted and used. I also wrote about Bounce Rate in my post called Bounce Rate Demystified.

This post is about the follow-up question "Ok, I understand what bounce rate is and see the importance of it, now tell me, What is the typical Bounce Rate?"
To answer this very question, I conducted a survey to understand what Bounce Rates to expect for various types of sites. The sites were classified under 6 categories, ecommerce, Product Information, Lead Generation, News/Media, Branding and Other. Other was a bucket for sites that did not fit other 5 categories, some of the sites included in �Other� where social networking, online gaming, travel search engine, tool/utility, bank and training, customer support. Since most of the sites have more than one purpose, respondents were asked to select only one category to classify theirs sites based on the main purpose of the site.

Let�s jump into the results.

Bounce Rate Range

The table below shows the minimum and maximum bounce rates for the six categories. Bounce Rates ranged from 3.24% � 85%.



Average Bounce Rate

Average bounce rate of 80 sites who responded was 40.58%.



Average bounce rates were above 30% of all the six categories. News/Media sites had highest average bounce rates. This is what I had expected too, considering how users consume or reach media sites. A lot of visitors reach a news/media site via a link from another site, blog post etc. Once they read the article/news they go back to the sources that lead them there.

Bounce Rates on Top Entry Page

Top entry page is the page where majority of the visitors enter the site. The following chart shows the bounce rates on the top entry pages of various types of sites.



For all the site categories, average bounce rate on the top entry page was lower than the average bounce rate. News/Media had the highest bounce rate on their top entry pages. Again, as I said above, visitors enter news/media site via link from another site, blog post etc and go back to the source after reading the news/story.

Bounce Rate on the Home Page

Before the proliferation of the search engines there used be one entry page to the site and that was called home page. Almost all of the visitors entered the site though the home page. Today visitors enter the site via various pages and a lot of them might not even see the home page during their visit as I saw with some of my clients and wrote in my blog post "Homepage � How critical is it".
The following chart shows the percentage of sites that have Home page as the top entry page. The survey showed that Homepage is still the top entry page for majority of the sites.





Except News/Media site other categories of sites had a higher Bounce Rate when the home page was the top entry page. I think when user enter a News/Media site via home page they know the brand name and are coming to look at what is currently available and use home page to dive deeper into the site.

One of the possible reasons for a higher bounce rate, when home page is the top entry page, is that the home page in most of the cases is very generic and shows up in search engine results pages for keywords that might not be on the home page any more. For example an eCommerce site might have showcased an iPhone on the homepage when the site was indexed. A user searches on iPhone and lands on the sites homepage. Guess what? The site is no longer showcasing iPhone and now the product that they are showing on homepage is a Blackberry instead. What does the user, who is looking for iPhone, do? Most likely, Bounces, resulting in higher bounce rate. Considering this very impact, I had written an article called Follow the Search. Check it for a tip on how to lower the bounce rate on home page.

Search and Bounce Rate



Search, paid or organic, is one of the top traffic drivers for most of the sites. The bounce rate on Paid Search was higher for all the categories except for News/Media. This is alarming considering you are paying for all the visitors. The worst of all were Branding sites. I am sure when you talk to the marketing (or campaign managers) they will say that mission was accomplished since the user did come to the site even if they left without going any further. I agree that a visitors was exposed to brand but there is more that a marketers needs to think about than just getting visitors on the site (this is a topic for another post so I won�t go in details in this article).

News/Media site showed higher bounce rate for organic search then paid and lower than paid search. Again, as mentioned above possible reason is that when visitors find a new or story via search they come to a specific story and then leave after reading it, while visitors coming by paid search are either driven to home page or a landing page and expect to dive into at least another page.

Landing Pages and Bounce Rate

The question is do landing pages affect the bounce rate? Should you have a landing page? Except for lead generation sites, majority of all other site categories did not have unique landing pages for their campaigns.





As most of the sites have a Paid Search Campaigns (PPC), I used PPC to understand if Landing pages have an impact on the bounce rates. All three categories that answered the question about landing page and PPC campaigns showed that having a unique landing page for each campaign dramatically decreased the bounce rate. There was a drop of over 25 percentage points in bounce rate when unique landing pages were used as compared to when no unique landing pages were used. I hope this gives you are reason to start thinking about having unique landing pages for your campaigns.

Summary

• Remember every site is unique so will have a unique bounce rate. Bounce rates ranged from 3.24% - 85%
• Paid search has higher bounce rate than organic search, unless you have a news/media site.
• If you top entry page is Home page then you can expect to have higher bounce rate. Using Behavioral Targeting can make your homepage a unique landing page on the fly and hence result in reducing bounce rates.
• Landing page make a significant impact on the bounce rate. Consider having a unique landing page for every campaign you run.

Questions? Comments? or to get a PDF of this article, email me at batraonline@gmail.com

Sponsored Message: Reduce Bounce Rate and Increase Conversion Optizent UnBounce. Convert any page into a unique landing page on the fly.

Bounce Rate Survey needs your input

Have you wondered how the bounce rate of your site compares to the others in the same industry? After I wrote the blog post about Bounce Rate I got several emails asking me if I had data or info on the bounce rate in their industry. Here is your chance to participate in an effort to collect bounce rate and conversion data. Please take few minutes to fill out a small survey.

I will publish the results on this blog and in Web Analytics Association�s newsletter.
Take Bounce Rate Survey and help me gather this information which will benefit all of us.

Note: Here are the results of Salary Survey that I conducted last year.

Note: I will be closing this survey on 5th, so please participate it in now.

Bounce Rate Survey

Have you wondered how the bounce rare of your site compares to the others in the same industry?
After I wrote the blog post about Bounce Rate I got several emails asking me if I had data or info on the bounce rate in their industry.
Here is your chance to participate in an effort to collect bounce rate and conversion data. Please take few minutes to fill out a small survey. I will publish the results on this blog.

Take Bounce Rate Survey

Note: Here are the results of Salary Survey, that I conducted last year.

Bounce Rate Demystified

Time and again my clients ask me about Bounce Rate. This made me think that there is still confusion about what is bounce rate and exit ratio. The three main questions that have come up are

1. What is bounce rate?
2. What is the industry standard for bounce rate?
3. What causes high or low bounce rates?

I am going to answer these questions in this post.

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a site (or a page) and then leave immediately. Think of a ball (visitor) that is thrown (visits) towards a table (site). It hits the table and bounces back without rolling (visiting any other pages).
Generally, �leave immediately� in the above definition means without going to any other page. However it could also be expressed in terms of time spent on site, say users who spend 5 seconds or less on the site irrespective of the number of pages they view.

Bounce rates are calculated both at the individual page level and at the site level. For an individual page, bounce rate is the ratio of visitors who enter the site from that page and leave without going any deeper, to the total number of visitors who enter the site through that page. In other words it is single page visits/ total entries to the site through that page.
At the site level, bounce rate is simply single page visits/total site visits.



Note: If a visitor enters though a page, refreshes it (manually or via auto refresh such as ESPN score page or MSN money page) but never goes beyond the first page the visit is not counted in the bounce rate.

Bounce rate is often confused with Exit Ratio. Exit ratio is usually expressed as the percentage of exits from a page to the total number of visits to that page. As a side note: A lot of times exit ratio expressed as % of visits can be misleading. In most cases, page views are actually more appropriate than visits for this ratio. Why page views and not visits? If I view the same page twice during the same visit, and after one of those page views I exit, shouldn�t my exit ratio be 50% rather than 100%? The first view of this page was compelling enough for me to further engage. A 100% exit ratio would indicate a problem that may not be there.

Bounce rate is confused with Single Page Visit Ratio: Single page visit ratio is calculated as a percentage of single page visits over total visits to a page.

Here are two examples that will help you clarify

1. A visitor who enters site at home page and then goes to contact us page and leaves from contact us will be counted in the exit ratio from the contact us page but won�t be counted in the bounce rate of contact us page.
2. A visitor who enter the site from contact us page and then leaves without going any further counts in all three, exit ratio, single page visit ratio and bounce rate.

So to Recap:

Single Page Visit Ratio= Single Page Visits to the page/ Total Visits to the page
Exit Ratio= Total Exists from the page/Total Visits on the page or Total Exits from the page/Total Page Views of the page (see explanation above)
Bounce Rate= Single Page Visits to the page/Total Entries to the site through that page.
Note: All of the above three are generally expressed as percentages.

What is the industry standard for bounce rate?

The simple and short answer is that there is no industry standard. I know you don�t want to hear that, but it is true. There is no industry standard. There are some ranges that I will share shortly but we can�t call them industry standards. There are a lot of factors that influence the bounce rate, so you really can�t compare bounce rates of one site (or page) to another. I have listed those in the next section.

The goal of the site should generally be to reduce the bounce rate to as low as possible. The lower the bounce rate the better job the site is doing to keep users engaged. One exception may be a site that is intended to accomplish all relevant user engagement on it�s landing page. This is more common on say, a campaign landing page intended to sign up users for direct marketing emails.

Bounce rate is very unique to your site and page. The best way to know if you are doing better or worse is to set your own baseline and compare your performance over time.

I have seen most bounce rates fall between 18 � 30% on home page and the site overall. Any page with a bounce rate higher than 30% should be looked at closely. I am not saying that you should not analyze the pages below 30% bounce rate. Remember there is always room for incremental improvement.

There are several factors that determine the actual bounce rate of any page.
Here are some of the numbers that were listed by Steve Jackson based on his experience with various sites.

Source: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/webanalytics/message/6116

Retail sites driving well targeted traffic 20-40% bounce.

Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as add to cart) I've seen
bounce at a much higher rate, anywhere from 70-90%.

Content websites with high search visibility (often for irrelevant terms)
can bounce at 40-60%.

Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups etc) have much lower bounce rates in our
experience 10-30%.

Service sites (self service or FAQ sites) again usually lower 10-30%.

Lead generation (services for sale) 30-50%.

Per Steve,
�I must stress that all the above figures are based purely on our own
experience after working with clients. I wouldn't advise you base an
optimization model around these numbers. We advise that when forming a
benchmark, that you do it internally. Take the average bounce rate over a
given period on your current site. You need to have at least 1000 entries
coming from normal sources to get reasonably actionable data.
Measure what the average bounce rate is and then work to get that down.�

What are the factors that affect the bounce rate?

Below are some of the factors that determine the bounce rates. You can use this as a checklist to diagnose a high bounce rate issue.

1. Source of your traffic � Each source results in a different bounce rate. When setting your baseline create overall baseline and baselines for each traffic source e.g. display advertising, organic traffic. With one client I found out that the traffic driven by searches (paid and organic) and sources other than campaigns had a much lower bounce rate than traffic that was driven via display ads. Their display ad had 90% bounce rate while other traffic only had 35% bounce rate. Their overall bounce rate was around 55%, way lower than 90% and giving them a misleading picture.
2. Search engine ranking of the page � A page which ranks higher on irrelevant keyword will get a higher bounce rate. I have seen this to be an issue a lot of times. I wrote an article on how to follow the search and reduce your bounce rate.
3. Type of Audience � If you are advertising and reaching the wrong audience you will see higher bounce rate. Bounce rate will tell you if you need to better target your ads.
4. Landing Page Design � Landing page design affects the bounce rate. I suggest A/B testing to improve after you have set your baseline. No matter how low you go there is always an opportunity for improvement unless you somehow achieved 0% bounce rate.
5. Ad and Landing Page Messages � If the messages on your banner or search ads are not aligned with the messages on the landing page then the chances are you will have one of those 50% + bounce rates. Make sure messages are aligned and give visitors a clear call to action. Many a times I have seen marketers sending users to a generic page instead of an appropriate landing page. This can (and will) result in higher bounce rates. Again A/B or multivariate testing should be used to reduce the bounce rate.
6. Emails and Newsletters � Subject lines, to and from, links, banners, the layout of email and the landing pages all work in tandem. They can either result in a great user experience and hence lower bounce rate or can result in a disaster. Do testing (More on this later in another post) to reduce bounce rate.
7. Load time of your page(s) � A longer load time can result in visitor bailing out of the site causing higher bounce rates. Conversely, users can hit the refresh button, thinking there was a problem with the page load. This will incorrectly reduce bounce rate.
8. Links to external sites � A page that has links to external sites (or sub domains/ pages that are not tracked in the same data warehouse) will show higher bounce rates.
9. Purpose of the page � Some pages� purpose is to drive users inside the site while other pages provide the information that user is looking for. A page that provides the end result can show higher bounce rate. One example is the support page on my bank�s web site, I have this page bookmarked. Whenever I need my bank�s phone number, I go to my favorites, pull this page, get the number and leave.
10. Other factors - Pop-up ads, pop-up survey requests, music, streaming video, all can have an adverse effect on bounce rates if users become annoyed.

Hope this clarifies the confusion around Bounce Rate. I would like to thanks Brad Gagne, who challenged my thinking on this subject, provided his valuable insight and proof read this article.

As I was writing this post I came across another article on the same subject by Avinash Kaushik, you can read his article at http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2007/06/bounce_rate_sexiest_web_metric.html.

Here are the other articles in the Demystified Series

Question? Comments?

Sponsored Message: Reduce Bounce Rate and Increase Conversion Optizent UnBounce. Convert any page into a unique landing page on the fly.